News at Eleven: Simplicity and bathos dominate many

of the poems, but their effect on readers is not simple at all. [Wendy] Cope uses bathos to unsettle. "Sixty-one and on a diet" is a discomfiting, savage little piece (her bite worse than her bark). It is the opposite of a nursery rhyme--a mortuary ditty. Morbidity, here and elsewhere, is presented as a grim joke--as love once was. And she is playful about her fear of extinction in "Once I'm Dead":

from The Guardian: Family Values by Wendy Cope

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